Ehrlich defends Jim Crow

Sunday mornings are whenRobert L. Ehrlich Jr.gets to share his right-wing political views with the rest of us, but his most recent column was more extreme than usual ("It's not easy being attorney general," July 29).

He defends Jim Crow politics in the South and anti-immigrant bigotry in Arizona. But the most outrageous position he takes is to defend the cruel voter suppression measures in a number of states designed to keep minorities and low-income voters from exercising their right to vote. Federal studies conducted under the Bush Administration documented that only several hundred voter fraud cases were shown to occur nationwide over several years, and that voter fraud is a non-existent problem.

The former Maryland governor cites the fact that in Florida voter rolls contain 100,000 non-eligible voters. But that has nothing to do with voter fraud, it is due to the fact that in Florida when people die, their names have not automatically been purged from the rolls. Since dead folks are not likely to show up at the polls, it is difficult to imagine how this might result in voter fraud.